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.cb PRODUCTION IS THE SOLUTION TO THE ENERGY CRISIS

	America would be independent in energy by now
if had we pursued independence through production starting at
the first energy crisis in 1973.  We didn't because environmentalist,
anti-capitalist and anti-technology sentiments were too strong.
There is some chance that we can bring ourselves to adopt a
production-oriented energy strategy now that our weaknesses
are showing up, and those who consider themselves our enemies
are taking advantage of our weaknesses.

	The energy policy needed to be barely sure of surviving
must have all the same elements as one that would enable us to live
well.  To survive we must use nuclear energy and make major use of
use of coal and shale resources.  With more of the same, we can have
enough energy so that people needn't make efforts to conserve
beyond what is motivated by energy costs.
Whoever prefers austerity may live that way, but they should let
the rest of us be prosperous.
.<<This version of PRODUC is oriented towards the political
.platform of a presidential candidate.
.It avoids analysis of the opposition.>>
THE SOLUTION TO THE ENERGY CRISIS IS TO PRODUCE ENERGY

	The solution to the energy crisis producing more energy.
Many scientific studies have shown (the most recent being
a four year α$4 million study by the National Academy
of Sciences) that our
country can produce all the energy we need and even
all anyone wants.  Unfortunately, successive administrations have
hobbled the productive energies of the American people.
The energy sources that we must use in order to barely
survive can give us all the energy we can possibly want
provided we use them vigorously.  Anti-energy sentiment
and squabbling and neglect have gotten the country in such
a hole that a crash program for energy production
like the crash programs of World War II is needed to prevent
serious suffering - blackouts, inability to
heat our houses, and inability
where we want and work where they want.

	There are short term problems and long term problems,
and we propose solutions for both.

Electricity

	We now produce forty percent of our  electricity with
oil and we must stop.  California produces 82 percent of its
electricity with oil and Illinois 9 percent.  If every state
did as well as Illinois, we would be in good shape for
electricity.  The solution in the short term is nuclear
energy and coal.  Nuclear is better because it is cleaner
and because there may be a long term problem with carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere that will make coal and oil burning undesirable.
America can use both coal and nuclear; most other countries
must use nuclear energy because they have no coal.  In order
to make nuclear energy last more than a hundred years, we must
develop the breeder reactor, and then our electricity problem
is solved for hundreds of thousands of years.

Heating our homes

	If we can stop using oil for electricity, oil for home
heating will last longer, but within the next twenty yerars
home heating oil will run out too unless we make synthetic
oil from coal or shale.  We are in a little better shape for
natural gas, but we will run out of that soon too, and we can
make synthetic gas from coal.  In the long run we will have
to switch to electricity used efficiently with good insulation
and heat pumps.  Perhaps we can use hydrogen instead of natural
gas, but it must be made from water using electricity.
It has recently been discovered that insulation should not be
too good, otherwise the interiors of houses get bad air pollution.


Driving our cars

	Getting a substitute for gasoline for cars and planes will
take a while, and none of the substitutes are well developed.
Stopping the use of oil for generating electricity will give
us more time.  Synthetic gasoline from coal and shale are
possible, and South Africa expects to get a quarter of its
oil supply from coal by 1983, so we know it can be done by
a determined country.

	Maybe we can use synthetic gasoline for cars for hundreds
of years, but maybe the carbon dioxide problem will make us
change sooner.  There are two main possibilities.  One is
electric cars, and there the problem is batteries.  The problem
is that 100 pounds of present day batteries can store less
than a 20th the energy of 100 pounds of gasoline, so a battery
powered car can't go far between charges.  Also present batteries
wear out quickly when so heavily used and have to be replaced
frequently.  There are some possibilities for better batteries,
and we need to push the research much faster than it has been
going.

	The other long term possibility is hydrogen which doesn't
produce carbon dioxide when it burns.  It will require much
nuclear energy to produce the hydrogen, and much research is
needed to handle difficult substances like liquid hydrogen
in millions of cars.  This last problem has reached the
level of experiment only in Japan; our energy authorities are
too timid.


Industry

	Forty percent of the energy use in the country is
in industry.  Much of its needs are the same as thouse
of consumers, but it needs energy in larger chunks, especially
in the form of heat.  For some of these purposes, nuclear
plants can serve - sometimes shared with public utilities.


"Alternative" sources of energy

	Strong political movements oppose all the above sources of energy
and propose using less and using alternative sources of energy that
haven't been developed yet.  In spite of intensive effort, there is no
plausible plan for getting enough energy from solar plants, wind or tides
or geothermal or nuclear to avoid intensive development of nuclear energy,
coal and synthetic fuels.  Nor is there convincing evidence that these
alternative sources would have advantages in cost or cleanliness.  We
should continue our research in alternative sources of energy but we
shouldn't waste money on useless medium scale demonstrations - like making
utilities build windmills that produce electricity at more than ten times
the price they currently charge their customers.


The Environment

	In the last ten years enormous effort has gone into
cleaning up the environment.  The price of cars has gone up
more than twenty percent due to emission controls alone.
Industry spends more than thirty percent of its new investment
on meeting pollution regulations.  The result of this expenditure
has been quite substantial in terms of a reduced number of
smoggy days and more swimmable water, but the regulatory
bureaucracy has gotten out of hand.  This is because the
natural tendency of any bureaucracy to over-regulate was
made worse by bureaucrats who want to use their powers to
coerce a change in life style.

	As a people, we are curiously ungrateful for what they
are doing for us.  We feel the cost in our pockets and we
don't regard the environmental changes as income.  Of course,
we could have gotten the same environmental improvements
for less cost were our rulers less fanatical.


Dangers

	Everything we do is dangerous.  Our most dangerous
activity is driving and that kills less than a tenth as many
people as heart attacks.  All forms of energy production
put together kill less than a 50th of the number of people
who accidentally kill themselves with cars.  Nuclear energy
has been the safest of all.

	We have to stop concentrating on what if this or that kind of
thing goes wrong with a production process and ask what if we continue to
neglect energy production.


The danger of an energy stoppage

	When the crunch comes, it will probably have a foreign trigger
like a stoppage of oil from the Middle East.  But the basic fault will be
neglect of production that made us vulnerable and tempted fanatics to push
us and our friends around.  If there is a such a crunch, and we are now doing
nothing to avoid it, it will be very unpleasant.  We may not be able to
heat all our houses and people will have to move in with others.  There
may be no driving except to and for work, and young people, as in
Russia, may have to live in dormitories near their work.  It will be so
unpleasant that we will treat it like a war even if it doesn't get us into
a war.  It would be better to avoid the suffering, but it is so late now
that maybe all we can do is reduce it by beginning a production program.


Energy independence

	In 1973 a Project Independence was proposed to make America
independent of energy imports by 1980.  The goal was feasible, and we
would be much better off if we had achieved it, but the opposition to
energy development succeeded in studying it to death.  We are in much
worse shape than we were in 1973, but we can achieve energy independence
by 1989 - the 200th anniversary of the Constitution - but we need a crash
program to do it.


A crash program

	In World War II there were several outstandingly successful
crash programs.  Within weeks after Pearl Harbor the Japanese captured
our major sources of rubber, and we had to develop a synthetic
rubber industry from scratch.  A few days after Pearl Harbor, President
Roosevelt in a radio speech said we would build 50,000 airplanes; we
actually built 100,000.  Cargo ships were built in four days.
However, the crash program most nearly
comparable with one of our present problems is the one that
built the Hanford nuclear plant for the production of plutonium.

	The first nuclear reactor in the
world "went critical" in December 1942.  When the decision to
build Hanford was made, only microscopic amounts of plutonium
existed in the world.  The profession of nuclear engineer didn't exist.
Yet by early 1945, the reactors were built and had produced
enough plutonium for the bombs and this plutonium had been
separated from the fuel elements by a chemical plant designed
for remote operation on account of the intense radioactivity.
That plant, built in less than two years,
continued to operate for many years after the war.  It is about
one third as powerful of a modern pnuclear power plant that
takes ten years to build in the U.S.  (It takes about five years
in Japan or Taiwan).

	If we need and the will, it will take from six months to two
years to build a nuclear plant - the experts haven't given the problem
enough thought to say which, since no-one asked them.
Now we must ask them.

	Besides nuclear plants, we must build plants for making
synthetic fuel from oil and shale.  There isn't a simple comparison,
but America can do at least as well as South Africa - especially
since they are using American developed technology.

	The information to say how much it will cost isn't available,
but we can surely achieve energy independence in ten years for
less than a trillion dollars, i.e. the equivalent of 7 years Defense
budget or 5 years HEW budget.

	We will have to mobilize scientific and engineering effort
as in World War II.  We will have to spend the money to bring several
approaches to producing different kinds of energy to the prototype
stage in order to be sure of having the best production alternative.
Even this will be quite complicated, because the scientific and
engineering communities have been to some extent corrupted by
government money into following prevalent energy ideologies that
emphasize approved "benign" sources of energy.  In order to get
research money, some universities and companies are proposing
projects in whose ultimate success they have no confidence.

	In nuclear energy, we will have to restore the research position
of the 1950s when new reactor types were built in a couple years
and tested.  Now no new reactor types are being built, because
the present atmosphere requires certainty before building a
a prototype, and the lack of prototypes produces ever greater
uncertainties and "what if" scenarios.

	There will have to be priorities for manpower and materials,
and we must face the fact that some projects will be misguided,
and that there will be scandals.

	The proposed Energy Mobilization Board looks like a good
organizational start since it copies the War Production Board of
World War II, but it doesn't look like there is real determination
behind it yet.

Some moral questions

	Some people say that America with five percent of the
world's population uses 40 percent of the world's energy.  We
say there is nothing wrong with Americans using as much
energy as we want provided we pay our own way by producing
it ourselves or producing what the producers want in exchange.
In principle, there
is nothing wrong with importing energy, but in the present situation
we should plan not to stop importing energy for several reasons.

	First we and other countries are being cheated by the OPEC oil
monopoly.  Second, of all industrial countries, we are in the
best position to be independent in energy because of our head
start in nuclear energy, and because of our large coal supplies
and our still substantial oil supplies.  Third we are now
outbidding the poor countries for oil from the monopoly.

	Some people say that even if we can get the energy we
should change our life style.  There is nothing to prevent
anyone who wants to live a simple life from doing so.  Unfortunately,
a spirit like that behind the adoption of Prohibition in 1918
is widespread in America.  The interest is less in living
a simple life than in coercing everyone into living in the
approved life style.  The prohibitionists, however, were
at least honest enough to try to amend the Constitution; they
didn't try to accomplish their objectives with armies of
lawyers filing thousands of individual lawsuits demanding
that everything they disagree with be rehashed again for
another two years.

	In our opinion, there is nothing moral in keeping
a house at 65 degrees rather than 75 if that is what you
prefer.  There is nothing moral in carpooling rather
than preserving the freedom to run an errand on the way
home from work.  There is nothing moral in forcing
old people to live with relatives because they can't
afford to heat their homes.  There is nothing moral
in preventing young people from establishing homes of
their own.  There is nothing moral about living in apartments
rather than in single family homes.

	There is a difference between sacrifices designed to
meet an emergency and a permanent change in life style
because people who think we ought to live differently have
wormed their way into the bureaucracy.  They asked the people
of California to use less electricity and took advantage of
the sacrifices to claim that nuclear power plants were
unneeded; this in a state that generates 82 percent of its
electricity from oil.


Economics

	We have discussed the need for energy production and the
technologies available.  We have not discussed how the work
should be divided between the government and the private sector,
and what legal changes are required to liberate our productive
energy.  We will have a program for that.

	Right now we can say that it won't be cheap.  We may have
to spend a trillion dollars on energy facilities in the next
ten years, but the investment in energy independence and
security will be worth it.

Why haven't we done it?

	America was stimulated by Pearl Harbor into making immense
efforts.  The oil embargo of 1973 stimulated sentiment that could
have led to similar efforts if the enthusiasm hadn't been dissipated.
For example, the Alaska pipeline had been dragging on for years, but
Congress voted 369-14 to put it through.  President Nixon proposed
Project Independence but either could not or would not follow through.
Plans for production were tied up in a maze of studies.  The
Energyxxx under John Sawhill labored a year and produced a stack
of reports almost exactly like previous stacks of reports.

	Why did we respond so weakly?

	In the first place high administration and congressional
officials were against solving the energy problem.  For example,
Russell Train, Nixon's Environmental Protection Administrator,
said in early 1974

	Secondly, the opposition to the Vietnam war took an
ever more frankly anti-American turn - against anything that
might make America stronger.

	Third, the environmental movement took a turn where every
pro-production action was regarded as against the environment.
This attitude still exists.  No compromise with environmental
moderates will prevent the more fanatical from engaging in
legal guerrilla warfare, and no excess of the fanatical will
make the "moderates" from abandoning them as allies.